Matt Schaub: Players/NFLPA must focus on leverage NOW

The 17-year NFL QB explains to Go Long why he's running for Executive Director of the NFLPA. Billions are at stake. "We are the game. We are the reason people are ravenous about football."

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By Matt Schaub with Jason Cole

If I were the Executive Director of the NFLPA, one of the first things I’d do is ask Patrick Mahomes, T.J. Watt, Micah Parsons, Josh Allen, Cam Heyward, Lamar Jackson, and a bunch of other NFL stars to visit Saudi Arabia.

Before I explain the reason why, let’s briefly discuss where the NFLPA stands after an incredibly turbulent July and the decision to replace the departed Lloyd Howell with interim Executive Director David White. White’s first message was about bringing honesty and transparency to the union. I appreciate that and agree.

But it’s also like telling NFL players they need to hydrate during training camp. It goes without having to say. What’s not as obvious is that time is running out fast for the NFLPA and all players as we gear up for a fight over the next the Collective Bargaining Agreement.

That’s a negotiation that could be worth upwards of $800 Billion.

Yes, $800 BILLION. That’s not a typo. It’s a reasonable projection based on more than 30 years of financial performance and the expectation of what the future media contracts will be worth. That is a staggering amount of money. Put it this way, if you started spending $10,000 every single minute of every single day, it would take more than 152 years to spend $800 billion.

That’s the kind of money which we know is possible. Assuming we get our fair share, that amount would allow all current, former, and future players to have lifetime healthcare. It would allow for vastly improved retirement benefits, including upgrades for former players and shorter vesting for younger players. It would allow for raising minimum salaries to a level where locker rooms would no longer feature such a chasm between top earners and minimum salary players.

If we don’t have a plan, they will continue to dominate us at the negotiating table and take the spoils of our work for themselves. That’s what they have done over the past 15 years as literally billions of dollars have shifted from our side to their side.

The average NFL team is now worth more than $7 billion, according to the August 2025 valuations done by Sportico. That makes NFL owners wealthier than ever. In 2011, the average NFL team was worth a little less than $1 billion. That’s a six-fold increase in 14 years. NFL teams aren’t businesses anymore. They are essentially annuities for the owners. They are investments with essentially guaranteed long-term returns, along with increased value of the overall asset. They are amazing investments.

Meanwhile, the vast majority of players can’t get guaranteed short-term contracts. The imbalance of wealth between NFL owners and players is greater than it ever has been. Moreover, it’s at a dangerous state where they can easily out leverage us with a lockout if we’re not prepared.

That’s why I am running for Executive Director of the NFLPA. It is important for players to know who truly wants the job and why. More importantly, players need to hear as many ideas as possible. The 2023 NFLPA Executive Director search, after which Howell was elected, was done in almost complete secrecy and the results are the current disaster. This election process needs to be out in the open, argued, debated, questioned, and thoroughly challenged … not unlike how we have to prove ourselves as players on the field every day.

And I say “we” because as a retired 17-year veteran I’m still very much a player in mind and soul. I also witnessed four CBA negotiations and was on many of the calls during those negotiations. I have seen the NFL from just about every angle. I went from a young mid-round backup to starter to Pro Bowler to veteran backup who at one point played for four different teams over four seasons. I have been drafted, traded, injured, and cut. I have spent much of my adult life in NFL locker rooms and I’ve also been in meetings with owners, executives, and head coaches.

Whether or not I become the next Executive Director, we need to be focused on the most important goal in any negotiation … creating LEVERAGE. I hear players and members of the NFLPA Executive Committee talk about the need to battle the owners on their terms. I can tell you right now that the only thing the owners and NFL executives worry about is their leverage compared to ours. They have spent the past 20 years making sure they have it and are doing everything to keep it.

To them, words don’t matter.

Clever offers don’t matter.

Demands don’t matter.

ONLY LEVERAGE MATTERS. In the past two CBA negotiations, we have given away staggering assets. In 2011, we went from getting 57.5 percent after giving them the first $1 billion for expenses to getting roughly 47.5 percent of all the money now (which you can find in Article 12 of the current CBA). With total national and local football revenues at approximately $23 billion in 2024 (based on projected figures from the Green Bay Packers annual financial report as the average for all 32 teams), our share under the previous system would have gotten roughly $12.3 billion. Instead, we got roughly $10.9 billion. To translate that simply, we gave the owners $1.4 billion last year alone from what used to be our share. Over the course of the 2011 CBA and the extension done in 2020, we will have lost roughly $25 billion according to projections.

And, by the way, we’re doing that while now playing 17 games based on the 2020 extension. We’re literally working more and getting less. We gave the owners another game and all we got in exchange was . . . another chance to get ourselves injured. If we’re not prepared for the next CBA, it could cost us upwards of $40 billion if we agree to another 10-year deal.

That’s all on top of skyrocketing yearly profits for NFL team. Recently, the Green Bay Packers reported a profit of $83 million for the 2024 fiscal year, according to Packers.com. That was after a $98 million profit in 2023, the site reported. By comparison, the Packers made $17 million in 2010, the year before the 2011 CBA deal. Think about the fact that the Packers don’t even have an owner pushing for more profit. They are publicly owned and the team with mid-range revenue projections and all the money goes to the team because the team doesn’t pay dividends.

Now, let’s consider the salary cap. The salary cap for players has gone from $120 million in 2011 to $280 million this year. In other words, the average value of the 32 NFL franchises has increased nearly 700 percent while the salary cap has only increased just over 100 percent. The average NFL franchise value entering the 2011 season was $1.04 billion, according to Forbes. Again, this month, Sportico declared the average NFL franchise to be worth $7.13 billion.

Yet the owners still have no problem locking the doors to leverage us. To get leverage for our side, we need to have a plan to walk away from what the owners offer us if it’s not in good faith. We must have an alternate way to make the money we deserve. I’m not talking about holding out or going on strike. If you know the history of the NFLPA, you know that strikes don’t work. They never have. Ever.

Rather, we have to play football. Whether it’s for a league that WE organize or one that is sponsored by another group or company, we have to play. That’s the only way to make real money. It’s the only way to put fear in the owners.

It’s the only way to get maximum leverage.

We also need to understand that despite the chaos that has existed at the union for the past month (and really for the past 17 years), we matter when we are unified. I know there are a lot of angry and frustrated players who look at our union as an embarrassment; one they don’t want to be associated with.

I understand the distrust. But remember, we are the game. We are the reason people are ravenous about football. We are the reason the NFL is the most valuable media property in this country, if not the world. Nobody tunes in to watch owners or coaches. They tune in to watch us. If we remember that and are unified, together we can get what we deserve and prevent the owners from continuing to take billions upon billions of dollars from us the way they have since 2011.

With that in mind, here is a breakdown of the important issues:

1. Institutional knowledge matters

Consider this: Over the past 80 years, the NFL has had four full-time commissioners. Those four men (Bert Bell, Pete Rozelle, Paul Tagliabue, and Roger Goodell) have one main thing in common.

They all worked in or for the NFL before becoming commissioner. Sometimes for decades. Bell was a coach and an owner. Rozelle was a team executive. Tagliabue was the NFL’s outside lawyer. And Goodell might be the biggest example of all. Goodell has never worked anywhere else in his life and spent more than 25 years in the league before getting the job. He has been part of the league since he graduated from college to now.

How valuable is Goodell’s institutional knowledge to the owners? In the 2020 and 2021 seasons Goodell made a combined $128 million, according to multiple reports and the public documents the league had to file at the time. That was during Covid and it was four years ago. It’s fair to say Goodell likely makes more than $70 million annually at this point.

Goodell is the highest paid employee in the entire league and in the history of the league, including players.

Think about that and think about it very carefully. The quality the owners value most is understanding the business of pro football. Institutional knowledge is understanding the intricacies of everything that goes into running the game. It’s knowing how it works, knowing what is truly important, and knowing what is a minor issue. It’s also about knowing the personalities of the owners, executives, coaches, and players.

We were at our best when we had our own version of that type of leader in Gene Upshaw, a Hall of Famer who played 15 years in the league and then spent 27 years with the union. The next Executive Director should understand the business of football to speed up the process of earning the trust of players and convincing them of a plan for the next negotiation.

I’m talking about the way the game is played and what we understand as players. I’m talking about knowing what you go through, both physically and emotionally, and about what you want long-term. We haven’t had that type of leadership since Upshaw died in 2008. I didn’t realize how impactful he was until years after he was gone.

Since 2009, I know what union meetings have been like. They are scheduled at bad times of the day, usually after a long day of meetings, workouts and an afternoon practice. Most of the information is not what you really want or need to know. Most of you just want your union checks so you can leave. I remember most of us couldn’t wait for the union meetings to end and that’s a shame.

I’m not saying that those leaders were somehow lesser people. What I’m saying is that they didn’t know the business of the game. They didn’t know what we players deal with. They didn’t know how to relate or communicate with us. They have never been in the locker room. They have never been on injured reserve. They have never been cut or traded. They have never had to face the realization that 100 percent of us will have to retire from a game that we gave so much to.

That depth of understanding is why the owners stay in-house with their commissioner. Meanwhile, since the untimely death of Upshaw, we have hired an outside lawyer who never understood our game (and claims in his book that he didn’t even like to watch our game). We then hired a former financial officer from a management company who had never represented workers. Worse, he was a financial officer who participated in a $377 million financial fraud case at his previous company.

Do you really think players listened to those guys? I can’t tell you the number of times I sat in a union meeting and said to myself, “These guys just don’t get it.” I’m not saying DeMaurice Smith was a bad person. He was a bad choice. Howell, by every account I have heard, was a nice guy with players. But he didn’t understand our jobs. In one of Howell’s first interviews, he was asked about playing 18 games and said he thought it was a good idea.

"It sounds attractive. Who doesn’t want to see more football, myself included?" Howell told The Athletic. Howell later backtracked, but it was an example of someone who simply didn’t understand our business. We’re talking about something very basic. We players don’t want more football.

We certainly don’t want to do it unless it’s worth the price we have to pay physically. Howell made a terrible negotiating blunder. We can’t afford those types of mistakes from people who don’t understand our game and our business.

That’s why Upshaw was the greatest Executive Director in NFLPA history. He understood the game without being having to be told. He could recognize when the owners were offering something legitimate and when they were playing a game.

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2. Time is not on our side

As of today, we have an interim Executive Director. Assuming that we do a search that is actually open and comprehensive, the union will not have a new Executive Director until sometime between March 2026 and June 2026.

The CBA currently runs through the 2030 season. However, the NFL has the option to get out of its media deals in 2029. That means that talks on a new CBA will likely begin sometime in 2027 or 2028 so that the NFL can negotiate new media deals in 2029 with the assurance of a CBA extension. Also, by way of explanation, the opt out was a major reason for the recent agreement between the NFL and ESPN to purchase NFL Network while, in the process, giving the NFL a 10% stake in ESPN.

That deal should tell you a lot. ESPN was so desperate to maintain a relationship with the NFL that it gave up part of the company. That’s staggering. Now, I have questions about that relationship and what it means for players, but that’s a smaller issue in the grand scheme of what we have to think about.

In the worst case, the NFL will renegotiate media deals before they officially end in 2033. Again, that means that settling the labor issue will be paramount.

What does that mean for the NFLPA? The next NFLPA Executive Director will have roughly half of the 2026 calendar year and perhaps the entire 2027 calendar year to implement a plan. More important, it has to be a plan that the roughly 2,000 players who go through the league on a yearly basis will stand behind in solidarity.

That is a massive undertaking. That’s why I repeat, we must START NOW with serious discussion about plans. Yes, the union needs to become transparent and honest immediately to regain the trust of players. Again, that goes without saying. What has to be said and recognized is that we are losing ground every day in the battle over $800 billion, which assumes we do another 10-year CBA.

I am NOT in favor of a 10-year CBA, but I talk about it that way to give players an apples-to-apples comparison about the money the next deal could be worth compared to the last two deals. As for the $800 billion breakdown, let’s discuss it.

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3. The $800 Billion Projection

Total NFL revenues for all 32 teams, including local and national contracts, came out to an estimated $23 billion in 2024. That estimate is based on the $719 Million in total revenue the Green Bay Packers reported for last year. The Packers are considered a mid-revenue team by league standards. They are a long way from the Dallas Cowboys at the high end, but they are also a long way from teams like Jacksonville at the other end.

Here's the bottom line: The NFL has averaged an 8 percent annual growth rate in revenue since the 1993 version of the CBA was negotiated, according to multiple sources. That’s 33 years of verifiable information. Assuming that growth rate, total revenues for the league will be $32.7 billion in 2030.

Now, if you just assume that business continues as usual with no out-of-control spikes in the media deals, the projected revenues from 2031 to 2040 will be a hair under $500 billion. Again, you can expect the NFL to opt out of its media deals in 2029 and cause a spike in the market. That’s what ESPN is anticipating and why it just struck a deal with the NFL in which ESPN gave up that 10% ownership stake.

Essentially, ESPN got married to the NFL in an effort to make sure it survives. And, by the way, the players don’t get any of that stake. We just get to share the profit on games. Frankly, I strongly believe that’s a matter of collective bargaining. If you really think about it, the NFL’s stake in ESPN only increases in value if ESPN is able to keep profits high and costs under control.

And that ultimately could mean less money for players to share, but I’ll table that for the time being. For now, let’s consider what the NFL could do to help increase the value of the next media deals.

• 18 Games: You can pretty much etch in stone that the NFL will demand 18 games by the 2030 season, at the latest. The simple math of going from 17 to 18 games is a 6 percent increase in value. By itself, that would raise the value of the next CBA to $550 billion over 10 years.

• President’s Day Super Bowl: The other advantage of an 18-game season is that the Super Bowl could be pushed back to President’s Day weekend. Why is that important? It adds a day of hotel room stays in Super Bowl cities. It also eliminates the biggest sick day in the United States (more people call in sick after the Super Bowl than any day of the year). It also turns the Super Bowl into even more of a national holiday than it already is. Value, value, and more value.

• More Overseas Games: A larger inventory of games means you have more games to export to places around the world. That’s more money for those individual games and more worldwide marketing.

• A Second Bye Week: One of the items the players will have to get if they play 18 games is a second bye week during the season for recovery. The good side for the players is that there’s a good chance to get rid of the short weeks we deal with for Thursday night games. The benefit for the league and its media partners is that a second bye week lengthens the season for programming.

This is just a start to what I mean when I talk about spikes in the media deals. The point is there’s a real chance the starting on a new deal in 2030 could be much higher the current projection of $32.7 billion. Is that high enough to drive revenue to $700 billion over the span of the next deal? No question in my mind. Could it maybe reach $800 billion? It’s hard to be specific, but given the NFL’s aggressive growth, $800 billion is not out of the realm of possibility.

4. The Leverage Play the League Fears

We live in an era when media platforms and outlets change faster and almost as violently as the winds of a hurricane. Newspapers and television networks are struggling to survive, decimated and replaced by ever-changing forms of social media with massive valuations or by streaming services that reach people faster and into more corners of the world than ever before.

Likewise, there has never been more wealth around the world that has moved so fast. Just last year, the number of billionaires in the United States surpassed 900 for the first time. Corporations like Amazon, Apple, and Google are each worth more than $3 Trillion. Nvidia is worth $4 Trillion. There are three private equity firms in the United States that all have more than $70 billion available for investment. This is nothing to say of international money, such as what we saw the $925 billion Public Investment Fund from Saudi Arabia do in recent years to disrupt the Professional Golfers Association.

This is where I come back to my idea of having Mahomes, Watt, Parsons, Allen, Heyward, Jackson, and a bunch of other stars to visit Saudi Arabia. The message it would send to owners would be quite clear.

Finally, there has never been a greater need for colleges to make money to pay for their athletic programs. There are an ample number of colleges that would love to host NFL games to help offset the costs they face now that college athletes can earn payments.

Do you know who understands that better than any of us? The owners. They know it and, privately, it scares them.

That’s why the owners made a really interesting argument in 2011 when the players were locked out. There was a hearing in front of three judges at the 8^th Circuit Court of Appeals in St. Louis that year. Paul Clement, one of the most accomplished lawyers in the country and who was working for the NFL, continually argued that the NFLPA should not be allowed to file an anti-trust case against the league for at least a “full business cycle,” which is essentially a full year. The argument was intended to keep the game on hold for at least a year, if possible, to put more stress on the players.

The NFL owners wouldn’t be able to operate that season and the players wouldn’t be able to play football. It was absurd. It was not only the NFL locking the doors to the business, they were essentially going to lock the players away, too. When Clement said that, all three judges smirked.

But ask yourself one thing: Why did Clement ask for that? The reason is simple. The owners don’t want us to figure out that we can do this on our own. They don’t want us to look around and see that other people, other corporations, all the private equity firms, and now all of the new, super-wealthy media platforms might be willing to help us do this on our own to get a slice of the business.

And, in the process, those people and organizations would like nothing more than to knock out the NFL owners who exist between them and the players. It’s competition. That’s why when I think about the state of the world in media, finance, and college need, I ask myself one question: Why do we need the NFL owners?

Why can’t we, as players, hire the people to operate the game the way the owners operate the game? Why can’t we decide the rules ourselves, hire our own commissioner, our own lawyers, and our own coaches? Better yet, why can’t we create a league full of situations like the Green Bay Packers, where the public owns and operates the team and the players make the lion’s share of the money?

I know some people might scoff at that idea, but here’s what Jim Quinn, who has spent nearly 40 years fighting for our union as an outside attorney, said recently: “This is exactly what the players should be thinking about. It’s a very different (media) landscape out there than has ever existed. There are other players who could and would easily get involved, like Netflix or Google. They would invest the money to get involved with showing games. There are the Saudis, who would certainly get involved. You see what the league is doing right now with private equity firms and it’s obvious the players could do … There are plenty of billionaires out there who would like to own teams.”

Finally, if you have been paying attention to what LeBron James is saying about the NBA, he has the very same idea about forming an alternative league that is controlled by the players. I know the NFLPA has sometimes toyed with this idea, but never thought to carry it through. I don’t understand why the union hasn’t done it.

There is no reason we can’t other than it takes a lot of time and effort to put together the plan. And remember what I said about time? We’re running out of it. If we want the ultimate plan that will give us leverage, we need to invest in this plan. We have to be willing to spend what will probably be several hundred million dollars to have everything in place for the biggest power play ever in NFL-NFLPA negotiating history. A power play that could be expressed it two words.

When Roger Goodell and the owners threaten to lock the doors to their business and threaten us with lost wages, we have to look them straight in the eye and say the following:

“Go ahead.”

If we can do that, our investment of several hundred million dollars will pay off in billions. For example, if we somehow got just one point back in the next negotiation, that would be worth $8 billion.

Or, if the NFL really tries to play hardball, maybe we end up owning the whole thing.

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Now, some of you might think this is like bluffing at your Wednesday night poker game. To that, I say two things. First, I don’t bluff. Second, the owners have always been scared of us figuring it out. It wasn’t just in 2011.

Let’s go back to the 1980s, when the NFLPA staged two largely unsuccessful strikes. In 1982, the league lost seven games because of the strike. The league also heard an earful from the TV networks who hated the loss of prime programming.

In 1987, the league heard those complaints loud and clear and infamously used “replacement” players (or, as they are better known, scabs) to keep playing games while the regular players were out. If you have ever watched the comedy “The Replacements” with Keanu Reeves, it’s based on that year.

But what’s also important is that famed media mogul Ted Turner, the guy who started CNN and all the Turner-branded cable stations, made an offer during the 1982. He put together two All-Star exhibition games before the NFL threatened to sue the NFLPA since the players were on strike and not locked out.

Turner’s plan was to start a six-team league, but that never got off the ground. It did, however, get attention of NFL owners. The first move was to have the replacement players ready for action in 1987. The second move, not surprisingly, was that Turner Broadcasting became the first host of Sunday Night Football after the league went with a full slate each week starting in 1990. Instead of listening to Turner give the players some ideas, NFL owners made him a partner.

Yeah, the owners are really smart.

To this day, the NFL is still doing versions of that. That’s why games are shown on ESPN, FOX, CBS, NBC, and Amazon. It’s why they just reached a deal with ESPN — which I strongly question because I think it’s a conflict of interest — to give up the NFL Network and rights to games in exchange for a 10 percent stake in ESPN.

It’s also part of the reason why the NFL is doing business with three private equity firms. NFL owners are doing their best to keep control of their world. But that’s really impossible. The PGA found that out in the early 2020s when LIV Golf and the Saudis essentially took over. If the Saudis had a chance to invest in professional football, do you think they might do it?

Do you think that sending an entourage of NFL players to Saudi Arabia to meet with them might get the attention (and maybe the fear) of NFL owners?

And yes, I do understand that there are a lot of people who don’t like the Saudis for important reasons. But understand that owners think nothing of locking out players, cutting us when we don’t measure up, and even colluding to prevent us from making money (and that’s another important topic for another time).

And again, the Saudis aren’t the only people or companies we could appeal to. Apple, for example, has liquid assets that are worth close to $2 Trillion. If we cut a deal for a loan or an equity deal with Apple, it could front us $30 or $40 billion without much pain.

My point is that there are ways to do this, but it’s going to take effort to explore. It’s also going to take a lot of discussion and education of players to keep us unified against any attacks by the NFL. It will also take time to educate and ease the fears of fans.

Let’s quickly breakdown those two issues next.

5. Educating the players

This is both simple and complicated. The simple part is that the union is terrible at educating players. We all know it, there’s no way around it. The complicated part is how to get players engaged.

First, I would completely change the 1-hour meetings. I would make sure those events were away from the team facility and much more social so that the Executive Director got to shake hands and meet with every player. There would be some question-and-answer, but this is mostly about real bonding.

Second, we have to deliver knowledge in much shorter and more digestible portions. The Collective Bargaining Agreement is a dense, 400-plus page document. No player can ever be expected to know it backwards and forwards. But they can learn important parts of the CBA or about critical issues by reading a one-page document or watching a 5-minute video that gets delivered on an NFLPA communication app. Players will participate video conferences that last between 15 to 30 minutes on a weekly or monthly basis.

Third, we must have an NFLPA representative in every NFL city. I’m not necessarily talking about a full-time position, but I am talking about someone with real expertise who will be on-call for players on every team to ask questions. This could be a former player who is trained in the CBA or is a lawyer or some other professional who has been trained. But when questions come up, players need to have someone who they can call or meet with directly. Additionally, that person will come by the team at least once a week to check in with the team player reps and the rest of the players to discuss any issues they need help with. Bottom line, we can’t expect players who are union reps to handle every problem. It’s not effective teaching.

Fourth, with the advent of NIL and more work being done by agents with high school and college players, there is a natural pipeline being created to help younger athletes start to think about what the NFLPA does. We need to raise our profile significantly with younger athletes. For instance, it really annoys me during the NFL Draft when players walk onstage after being drafted and give Goodell that big bear hug. It’s not that Goodell is a bad guy. Don’t get me wrong here. But Goodell is also not their advocate. Frankly, the NFLPA Executive Director should also be on stage to congratulate the player. Goodell can be up there and it’s important for players to know that a big part of his job is to grow the game. That ultimately helps the players. However, Goodell is paid by the owners to make as much money for them and to keep player costs down. In other words, when Goodell gives that hug, he’s also reaching into the player’s back pocket.

Fifth, and finally, I believe that one day we can have a NFLPA meeting that rivals the NFL owners meetings where we have every player show up at some destination spot, such as a resort in Hawaii, to meet with union officials and socialize among themselves. That’s a big goal, but we have to think big about how we change.

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6. Fan Reaction

I’m sure there are a lot of fans who have read this and, if they have gotten this far, they are probably scoffing at what we perceive as a problem. There are fans out there struggling to pay their bills or plan for the future and we’re talking about jobs that make hundreds of thousands of dollars, if not millions.

I don’t blame fans for being jealous of what players make and even aggravated by it. I just wish they had the same reaction to what owners make or would just accept that this is the money that’s available to us.

And some fans have probably read this and think that I want to end the NFL. They probably think that could mean the end of their favorite team. Let me say that there’s a long-term solution for that. I won’t get into that right now because it’s part of the leverage play for the players.

Suffice to say, the history of professional football will not go away. The passion for the game will not go away. The culture that the NFL has built will continue. In fact, it might be better in a player-run league.

But if you want to know the greatest benefit that fans will have if the players run the game, it’s simple: The tickets will be cheaper.

A lot cheaper. The food and the drinks will be cheaper. Even the streaming services that some of you get will probably be cheaper. Why? Because you won’t be paying the owners anymore.

7. Hiring a team

In 2023, I put together a team of 10 people to help me learn more about the issues and understand the process of becoming the next NFLPA Executive Director. What’s important is that I know how to run a team. I’ve been in the huddle and looked guys in the eyes to call plays with the game on the line. I know how to recognize what I need to put around me to be successful. I know there are great lawyers and other experts who either already work at the union or can be found who will provide expertise.

I know there are also plenty of former NFL team executives out there who we can hire as advisors (I don’t think they can be full-time employees, but certainly advisors) to give us key information on how the owners and the league think.

I also know the union had a recent drain of long-standing employees who had great institutional knowledge. I think it’s important to bring at least some of those people back. Perhaps not in the same roles as before, but certainly in a capacity that allows the union to tap in to their knowledge.

Finally, I believe that we already have some of the greatest negotiators and strategists at our disposal and they would be willing to work for us for free. There are numerous NFL agents who have worked for decades who know the CBA backwards and forwards. They also know the owners, team executives, and even league executives backwards and forwards. Finally, I know that they would line up for the chance of a lifetime to be part of a negotiation over $800 billion. Frankly, it would be in their best interests to participate.

8. Summation

I hope you have noted that I’ve kept my complaints about the union and what has happened recently to a minimum. There’s a time and place for that. It’s just like when we win or lose a game. The next day is for reviewing the last game, learning from mistakes, and making corrections. It’s also for being accountable to our teammates to move forward positively.

Again, honesty and transparency are absolute prerequisites to future success. I embrace that. In fact, I think my past success in playing 17 years and forming bonds with my teammates and coaches is a strong indicator of how I was successful as a player. I’ve also worked hard in retirement to understand that this is my passion. Leading the union and getting players what they deserve is important.

Educating, leading, inspiring, and protecting players is important to me.

It should be to anyone who wants to be the next NFLPA Executive Director.

In lieu of a traditional training camp tour, Go Long has spent this month piecing together a three-part series that’ll go live closer to the season. Stay tuned. Share with a friend. Thank you for fueling everything here.